Raspberry Pi Home Automation

[mirhagk]

I really want to take advantage of the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi, but I was having trouble what I could actually use them for. The project I want to try currently is a little bit of home automation, basically I want to control appliances in my room with the raspberry pi. I'd like to basically end up with a power bar where each individual outlet can be controlled by the raspberry pi, which acts as a web server, allowing other programs (ie my laptop, or my phone) to control it through wifi. I have looked into similar projects, but they all seem to want to accomplish it via radio waves, or with a remote control, neither of which I want.

I'm not amazing with hardware, but I understand the concepts, and basically I want to add an electronic switch to a power bar to only allow power to go through when the rasberry pi sends it a signal. I would probably end up making a little adapter so I can easily unplug the raspberry pi should I wish to use it for other purposes, so in this case the power bar should convert itself to a regular power bar. Is it possible to get a Push-Off electronic switch (transistor) that would be able to be controlled with a few volts (I think the GPIO are 3V3), but allow 120V to pass through the switch with no overheating? It doesn't need to be a transistor, it could be a relay, so long as it can be controlled with a few volts, and allow massive volts through the other side.

I ideally want to do this without burning my house down, so anything I can do to make sure I don't screw things up would be awesome, and if it's possible to test it without plugging it in, that'd be a bonus as well.

My question is how can I do this without spending a ton of money. I'm not afraid to do some work myself, but I don't want to spend $50 on something that is just a curiosity. I'm looking more into the <$5-$10 range, if that's possible. If it gets to around $25 I probably will just buy a clapper or something, and reverse engineer that.

[rdrake]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay#Solid-state_relay

[mirhagk]

Are one of these good?

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/New-Solid-State-Relay-SSR-40DA-40A-24-380V-AC-High-Reliability-Fast-Switching-/251131530546?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a789b0d32

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/New-SSR-25-DA-single-phase-solid-state-relay-Free-Shipping-/251131530955?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a789b0ecb

I'll have to figure out how the digital input works (is it active when a + is applied to the + lead, or what).